May the 3rd be with you

The outcome of the next election is uncertain but the trend is plain as day

Forget all the talk about this being a sliding-doors moment, or the most important election in our lifetime, and all the usual clichés. Even if by chance Labor win in their own right, or if—by some hard to fathom alchemy—the LNP manage to come back from the dead and win in their own right, the trend away from majority government will continue. And that’s what matters.

As we inch towards our May 3 deadline, it is apparent that global forces are at work and that Australia is outside and inside world events.

We are outside them because, thank heavens, various aspects of our electoral architecture are currently protecting us from the complete collapse into right-wing populism. In moving away from the major parties, we have allowed ourselves to build an alternative form of democratic participation at the community level that has managed to convert into moderate—even progressive—electoral representation rather than the extremism we see nearly everywhere else.

We are inside world events because we cannot be insulated from the larger global shift to the right, especially now that the United States has embraced fascism. The realignment that this will precipitate will force itself on us no matter what, and hard decisions will need to be made, decisions I don’t think either Labor or LNP are at all equipped to deal with.¹

The other reason we are inside world events is because our political system is itself the victim of a realignment that has happened over the last forty years under the influence of the dominant neoliberal ideology. That ideology has torn apart the bedrock of the democratic settlements that operated in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War in the West and elsewhere and it has undermined working-class solidarity to the benefit of capital consolidation.

This is nicely explained in a recent piece by Perry Anderson, a professor of history and sociology at UCLA. He argues that by “the turn of the century, socialism in both of its historical variants, revolutionary and reformist, had been swept clear of the stage in the Atlantic zone. The revolutionary variant: to all appearances, with the collapse of communism in the USSR and the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself. The reformist variant: to all appearances, with the extinction of any trace of resistance to the imperatives of capital in the social democratic parties of the West…”

Clearly, the ALP belongs in that latter category of reformism and they certainly maintain an element of that in their current makeup. Nonetheless, they have been subsumed in the sort of managerialism and incrementalism that aligns with the interests of capital that Perry mentions. Reforms in, say, housing or disability care are managed in partnership with private providers and the sort of “nation building” zeal that ultimately drives progressive reform is severely constrained.

Put simply, between about 1904 and 1983, our two-party system was based on a clear distinction between labour (represented by the ALP) and capital (represented by the LNP in its various iterations). Once Labor embraced neoliberalism, there was a convergence between the major parties, particularly evident in policy areas such as defence, economics, and taxation. Witness the latest Budget and the thrust of Labor’s early campaigning which is barely distinguishable from any stock-standard Coalition campaign about “lower taxes” of the last 100 years.

As the neoliberal order, first, began to squeeze the political centre, and then began to fail in its promises of betterment, dissatisfaction has grown and grown, without anywhere to go. Margaret Thatcher was fond of saying that “there is no alternative (TINA)”, but as the neoliberalism embraced by the major parties has continued to produce outcomes that include massive increases in inequality, wage stagnation, job and housing insecurity, climate collapse and an increase in state violence directed at protestors of all sorts, something has had to give.

But those in control—which is increasingly the new billionaire class—are rarely in a giving mood. And so, to quote Perry again, political consequences emerge:

…wholesale corruption, growing interchangeability of parties, erosion of meaningful electoral choice, declining voter participation – in short, the increasing eclipse of the popular will by a hardening oligarchy. This system now generated its antibody, deplored in every reputable organ of opinion and respectable political quarter as the sickness of the age – namely, populism. The widely differing set of revolts comprised under this label are united in their rejection of the international regime in place in the West since the 1980s.

As I say, Australia has so far avoided this embrace of populism, but we are still inside the conditions that bring it forth and this is what will play out in all our elections for the foreseeable future.

The diminishing band of hardcore Liberal, National and Labor voters may not allow themselves to see it—thus is the nature of partisanship—but many Australians have realised you can no longer just vote Labor or Liberal and expect to get vastly different outcomes. Sure, at the margins, Labor might be more progressive, but they are so constrained by their self-imposed managerialism and commitment to the interests of capital—particularly in their willingness to protect and subsidise the fossil fuel industries, even the salmon industry ffs—that there is a vast new centre of the electorate that is keen to place their vote with someone other the legacy parties.

Just to get something meaningful done.

What the 2025 election will do is give us our next data point on how keen people are to back the viable alternative we have been inching towards for thirty years, namely, minority government. It will further show what battles the various members of any progressive crossbench will need to fight if we are to continue to avoid a populist hard landing.

The election of 2022 was a two-steps-forward moment, and 2025 may well be a one step back moment. But the trend away from the major parties will continue simply because it must. The two-party system can no longer solve the small and large problems of a diverse nation like Australia.

And there is an alternative.

1. That’s a discussion for another time.